Are Ofsted’s school inspections leaving parents at the periphery?

Guidelines for Ofsted inspectors brought in this September mean that school inspectors are no longer judging schools and school leaders on how their engagement with parents impacts on the achievements of older children

A toolkit for parental engagement: from project to process

This article reports on and analyses a yearlong project supporting school staff to increase parental engagement with children’s learning. Working with 34 schools, the project included the provision of a toolkit (information and activities) as well as opportunities for school to school learning.The project was useful for all schools, but some schools experienced profound changes in outlook, belief and practices. The major influences of change in this project were professional discussion, the use of the tools provided and reflection on both tools and discussion. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for school leaders. <br/

Scaffolding homework for mastery : engaging parents

The value of parental engagement in the learning of children and young people has repeatedly been shown to be of value in the literature, and in practice (Fan and Williams 2010; Fan and Chen 2001a; Jeynes 2012; Jeynes 2014). One of the ways many parents feel they can be involved in their children’s learning is through support with homework, and homework forms a ubiquitous part of schooling in most systems. However, parental engagement with homework has been shown to be problematic in the literature (Medwell and Wray 2019; Cooper, Robinson, and Patall 2006). This paper combines the literature on parental engagement, with that on both the effectiveness and purposes of homework and that on the importance of mastery orientations for young people, to argue that the effective forms of parental engagement in young people’s homework will be engagement that supports and leads to mastery orientations on the part of children. The paper includes a schematic for this engagement and concludes with principles for designing homework tasks